Greetings from North Carolina!
I am in shock. We've been here since Saturday so what is that...4 days? Good thing we had the 7 day road trip to ease me into the whole "we now live in the South" and "huh, THAT'S what humidity feels like!" factors. But it's not the South or the weather that has me in a mini-coma. It's our temporary housing.

Let me re-cap: we had a sub-let lined up begining in late August, just as I was to start school in the kind of hippie cool-kid part of town, if you can call it that. But we had to come out a month early for AH's job and Duke provided us with a list of approved "corporate houses" that they would pay for. We had to choose wildly from a map of a place we had no clue about - and here we are. My biggest fear, which I repeated over and over to AH, was "I need to be able to walk somewhere - a coffee shop, a grocery store, that kind of thing". That has assuredly not happened. To call this complex isolated would be an understatement. A bus departs from a few miles down the road once an hour or so. There are other houses and there is forest. Acres of forest. AH has to take the car to work everyday until we figure some other way out and he gets over his first week of work nerves of being late or sweaty from riding his bike. I would walk places, I can walk for hours in my Keen's, but a freeway neatly bisects this tiny little area off from the world. I cried for 24 hours pretty much hysterically when we got here because I do not want to drive every day. I don't even drive! Strip malls suck the living soul right out of me. Planned communities make me want to curl up and die. And, yet, here I am somewhere that clearly relies on The Car. And I am deeply, deeply ambivalent about this fact. I'm not sure I can handle it. Even if I do get used to it, I'm not sure I WANT to get comfortable with it.

I am aware conciously that things will get better. We will move to the new apartment and I will be able to walk places again, including school. School will start and I will have things to do and new people to know. I won't be living with generic black vinyl furniture or glass kitchen tables. I won't feel so much like a 50's housewife when AH goes off to work in the morning. I will stop watching "Kate and Allie" and "A Baby Story" obsessively.

And I do know that there is an extra level of mental freak-out overlaying this whole picture thst is distorting my reality even further: this apartment situation is an excellent metaphor for my greatest fears about having a baby in 5 months or so. Fears of being isolated, trapped, resentful, waiting for another adult to come home to rescue me, needing a car to run errands, disconnected from everyone and everything. Powerful, scary feelings. Magnified by my 30 days here in the middle of nowhere. Without even a library card for God's sake (which I can't get until I have a piece of paper or bill proving I live here) which is making me a little crazy. I've got a dwindling pile of books but what's left? The wrist-slitting "After Leaving Mr. McKenzie" by Jean Rhys about, natch, isolation, powerlessness, fear and "The Road" by Cormack McCarthy. Fear for me.

I need a haircut. And waxing. And a maternity bathing suit. And just my things - my knitting, my projects, my books. And someone to meet up with. And to get the hell out of this complex under my own steam.

But - argues the other part of me. Why isn't your own skimpy resources enough for you? Your imagination? Self-discipline? Why not go swim in the pool or use their stupid gym? Write 8 hours a day? So I've been trying to wake up each morning and think of this place as Yaddo or something. A 30 day Writer's Retreat in a very odd place. I walk in the forest every morning, which truly is beautiful. I set timers and do work and make notes and try to make my internal life happen for myself. It works sometimes.

It will get better. But just let me whine a little until it does, okay?